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You may recall the years we've spent over the ridiculous monkey selfie story, concerning whether or not there was a copyright in a selfie taken by a monkey (there is not) and if there is (again, there is not) whether it's owned by the monkey (absolutely not) or the camera owner (still no). But one of the points that we raised was to remind people that not every bit of culture needs to be locked up under copyright. It's perfectly fine to have new works enter the public domain. So much of the confusion over the whole monkey selfie thing is that so many people have this weird belief that every new piece of content simply must have a copyright. Indeed, during the PETA legal arguments in trying to claim the copyright on behalf of the monkey, they basically took it as given that a copyright existed, and felt the only fight was over who got to hold it: the camera owner or the monkey.As we mentioned a few times throughout that ordeal, it really appeared that PETA's lawyers at the hotshot (and formerly respectable) law firm of Irell & Manella had taken on the case to establish some credibility on the issue of non-human-generated works and copyright. There isn't likely to be a rush of animal selfies (though there just was a pretty damn awesome penguin selfie -- no one tell PETA), but there are going to be a whole bunch of questions in the very, very near future concerning copyright and works generated by artificial intelligence. If you look, there are already many, many law review articles, papers, think pieces and such on whether or not AI-generated works deserve copyright, and some of these go back decades (shout out to Pam Samuelson's prescient 1985 paper: Allocating Ownership Rights in Computer-Generated Works).But now many of these questions are becoming reality, and some lawyers are freaking out. Case in point: an article in Lexology recently by two Australian lawyers, John Hannebery and Lachlan Sadler, in which they seem quite disturbed about the copyright questions related to the new Clips camera from Google. In case you haven't heard about it (and I'll confess this article was the first I'd found out about it), Clips is a tiny camera that you "clip" somewhere while action is happening and it uses AI to try to take a bunch of good pictures. Sounds interesting enough, if it actually works.But, as these lawyers note, it's not clear there's any copyright for users of the device, and there almost certainly isn't in Australia where they practice:

The EFF hasn't released a scorecard for secure messaging apps since 2014. The scorecard has been updated several times, but there's no current quick reference guide for secure messaging that considers all the tech (and legal) developments over the past four years. The EFF's guide was handy, but it also was the target of legitimate criticism. Simplifying complex issues is helpful, but not if it inadvertently omits critical considerations.The EFF recognizes there's no quick and dirty way to solve everyone's security issues. Consequently, the EFF has announced that it will no longer be providing a secure messaging scorecard. It will still provide plenty of useful info for those seeking secure options, but it cannot in good faith claim to address every potential issue in an easy-to-follow infographic.

This week, both our winning comments on the insightful side came from anonymous commenters on our post about the CAFC's insane ruling overturning Google's fair use victory against Oracle. In first place, we have some thoughts on whether this goes any further:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2013, congress released its proposal for reforming the CFAA — and it managed to make the law even worse. Even the one change we at first thought might be good turned out not to be. The whole thing had experts wondering what the hell congress was thinking, and led Eric Goldman to make the case for ditching the CFAA altogether. Meanwhile, we continued to look at the dangers of CISPA, while Hollywood was still working on pushing SOPA abroad.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2008, a Columbia professor was jumping on the bandwagon of aggressively using patents and exploiting the ITC loophole, while Seagate was casually promising to try to stop SSD technology with a barrage of patent lawsuits. In Canada, Bell decided to start throttling traffic without telling resellers, and enjoying the monopoly position that let it respond to complaints with, pretty much, "deal with it". Meanwhile, TorrentSpy announced it was shutting down out of sheer exhaustion, Warner Music joined the crowd calling for an ISP tax, the IFPI kept putting pressure on ISPs around the world, and Rep. Berman trotted out the old line that anyone opposing new copyright laws just wants stuff for free.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2003, all eyes were on the war in Iraq, and we were looking at the impact on and from technology in many regards. Journalists were flexing new technological muscles in covering the conflict, and the military was flexing similar muscles to recruit new soldiers. The internet was changing how people get their war news, and sucking up a whole lot of time from people at home and in the office — and this empowered hackers and hosting companies to become censors. And in a stunningly politically motivated move, a congressman introduced a bill trying to pre-emptively ensure that any new cellular infrastructure built in Iraq after the war would be CDMA. (The war had so far existed for exactly one week.)

The topic of censorship crops up far too much here on Techdirt. Less common are stories about how to circumvent it. The two which follow are great examples of how human ingenuity is able to find unexpected ways to tackle this problem. The first story comes from Spain, and concerns a banned book. As the Guardian reports:

As entertainment streaming has officially become "a thing", one leading to massive change in the entertainment landscape, many eyes still turn towards the professional sports leagues. That's because live professional sports is now one of the last big bulwarks against cord-cutting. With that in mind, it's interesting to watch the major sports leagues experiment in streaming, a process that began roughly five years ago in earnest. While Major League Baseball has long led the way, the other leagues are catching up. The NBA in 2014 negotiated a new broadcast deal with Disney and TNT, one in which the league insisted that streaming options be significantly expanded. In fact, 14% or more NBA games are now nationally televised on those networks, with streaming options that do not require cable.While that sort of deal is to be applauded, it's admittedly fairly vanilla. Put more broadcasts up on streaming services. There's nothing too experimental about that. Especially compared with a new plan the NBA is kicking around for cheap streams of the last quarter of NBA games.

For years now the narrative du jour in online news circles has been that the news comment section is an irredeemable menace. Outlet after outlet has informed us that they care so much about the integrity of public dialogue online that they've decided to ban website visitors from commenting on news articles entirely. Usually, these bans are accompanied by some sanctimonious claim that banning people from speaking on site was done because the outlet in question just really "valued conversation," or because they're just ultra-interested in building better relationships.In reality, the motivation isn't quite so noble. Most websites just don't want to spend the time and money it takes to cultivate a healthy online community, in large part because bean counters can't monetize or measure the impact of quality discourse. Other outlets don't like having such a visible area where users can point out errors in news coverage. Most really would prefer we return back to the era of "letters to the editor" where the medium gets to dictate whose voices are deemed important, and whose are not. In that way it's often part power play, and part laziness.Time and time again, these outlets have claimed that banning comments is the only option because cultivating on-site community is too expensive and time consuming. Again though, there's every indication that making the news comments section useful again doesn't take all that much work. In Norway, for example, a five-person team tookt all of three hours to code a WordPress plugin with a comically-simple premise:

One of the largest stories of the past year has been the Larry Nassar story. Nassar, the now disgraced atheltic trainer for multiple entities, including USA Gymnastics and Michigan State University, has been accused by scores of women for sexual abuse and misconduct under the guise of his medical profession. Recently, Nassar's boss at Michigan State, William Strimpel, who was the university's dean of the osteopathic medical school, was himself charged with criminal sexual misconduct. Whatever is going on at Michigan State, it hasn't been good for some time.One would imagine that in the wake of the allegations and, in the case of Nassar, conviction, the school would be getting its collective shit together. Instead, MSU has taken on the project of obfuscating what occurred under the school's watch and, reportedly, paying half-a-million dollars to have an outside firm monitor the social media accounts of Nassar's accusers and the journalists that have been and are covering the story.

Back in 2016, the Malaysian government pushed for broad censorship of an already tightly-controlled internet. The basis for this push was the government's inability to stop Malaysian media from reporting on government corruption. This reporting continued on platforms (and with news agencies) the government didn't directly control. To shut this down, the government decided to strip immunity from media platforms, making them directly responsible for user content. This allowed the government to control the narrative by going after service providers, rather than those publishing inconvenient facts.The Malaysian government still hasn't been able to completely shut down critical reporting. Two years later, it's trying again, this time using an excuse provided by the newest US president: fake news.

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So, in the lead up to Congress' vote on FOSTA/SESTA, we pointed out that a court in Boston was likely on the verge of ruling that Backpage was not protected by CDA 230, because of actions the site had taken. Considering that the publicly stated rationale by nearly everyone supporting FOSTA/SESTA was that it was needed to get around Backpage's CDA 230 protections, we wondered why Congress couldn't wait to see how the court ruled. Yesterday, the Judge indeed ruled against a motion to dismiss in the case of one of the plaintiffs (there were three in the case), saying that enough evidence had been presented to get around CDA 230 for the time being. The key issue: whether or not Backpage directly changed the content, making it the content creator, rather than just the service provider. Backpage has insisted that it didn't make any changes (that a user did), but the court finds that there's enough evidence to reject the motion to dismiss, and to allow the case the move forward:

More well-intentioned lawmaking is resulting in terrible legislation proposals. France is looking to Germany for guidance for the first time in a long time, thanks to its Prime Minister's desire to regulate "hate speech" on the internet. Edourd Philippe has apparently overlooked the disastrous roll out of Germany's hate speech law, which has resulted in a steady stream of embarrassments since its inception.

This line of thinking can never be reinforced too often by public officials: the First Amendment is great but only if your speech doesn't offend someone powerful. (via Adam Steinbaugh)A California high school took matters into its own hands -- not even waiting to see if powerful people were offended -- and memory-holed both its physical and online student publication after a student wrote article about the relationship between art and activism made some parents take to Facebook to complain about "liberal propaganda."The article contained images found via Google searches, including one depicting Trump with a Nazi symbol on his head and another with a cop in Klan hood pointing a gun at a black child meant to represent Travon Martin. The following image comes from the Facebook post that started the backlash against the school.The cascade of criticism on Facebook led to the mayor of the California town (Don Kendrick) to offer this explanation of how someone at the Bonita High School made the mistake of allowing students to engage in protected speech. [Line breaks added for readability, since apparently even mayoral announcements on Facebook must be delivered as a wall of text.]

A constant refrain from the publishing industry is that it's impossible to make a decent profit from online publishing because of all those people downloading and sharing digital stuff for free. An interesting article in Caixin reporting on the Chinese digital giant Tencent offers an interesting perspective on that issue. It provides an update to a story we wrote last year about Tencent moving into online publishing, with evident success:

The Fifth Circuit Appeals Court says it's fine if the government uses mandated emergency services to perform real-time GPS tracking. It doesn't go so far as to affirm the constitutionality of the actions, but it achieves the same ends by voting down the appellant's request for a rehearing.What we can glean about the issue at stake comes from the eight-page dissent [PDF] written by judges James L. Dennis and James E. Graves, two of the seven judges who voted for a rehearing. In this case, the government used the defendant's cellphone provider to engage in real-time tracking. No warrant was obtained despite the government's shoulder-surfing of incoming GPS location data.

You will recall that conservative commentator Dennis Prager sued YouTube late last year because he didn't like how the site administered its "restricted mode" relating to several of his Prager University videos. The whole lawsuit was a mess to begin with, resting on Prager's claims that YouTube violated federal and state laws by silencing his speech as a conservative and falsely advertising YouTube as place for free and open speech. At the same time that YouTube asked the court to toss this canard, Prager sought a preliminary injunction to keep YouTube from operating its own site as it saw fit. In support of its petition to dismiss the suit, YouTube's Alice Wu offered the court a declaration that more or less showed every single one of Prager's claims, especially his central claim of censorship of conservatives, to be as wrong as it possibly could be.Now, mere weeks later, the court has agreed, penning a full-throated dismissal order that essentially takes Prager's legal team to task for failing to make anything resembling a valid claim before the court. We'll start with the court's response to Prager's First Amendment claims, which he makes by stating that YouTube is somehow a legally public forum, rather than a privately run website.

The debate over gun control has reached new heights following the shooting at a high school in Florida. Every mass shooting prompts debate over the Second Amendment and access to guns, but this one, led by students whose classmates were killed, has more momentum than most.Youth is wasted on the young, people say, as they note the steady decline in voter participation in younger demographics. This seems to imply more students should be involved in social and political issues, but this particular participation has been met with lots of ridicule and anger. In other words, it's been greeted with hypocrisy, which is pretty much what we expect in heated political debates.Nothing is more heated than the gun control debate. And everyone with an opinion is wrong. But it's the youth that are the wrongest, and those bemoaning youthful antipathy aren't responding very well to this sudden display of activism. Gun control-related walkouts have occurred in schools all over the nation, and students expressing their displeasure with their representatives are finding out firsthand how thin-skinned their representatives are.

As much conversation as gets logged on the topic of copyright infringement, or piracy, you may not have noticed that there are not that many arguments against piracy. Certainly there's a volume of voices, particularly those coming from the entertainment industry, but those voices are typically making only one of two claims. The first claim is that piracy is morally wrong. This claim typically devolves into something along the lines of "but piracy is theft", and relies on the intuitive notion that downloading, say, a song hurts the creator of that song by depriving them of income. If there was no income deprivation, there would be no moral wrong. The second claim skips the first part of that equation and simply asserts that piracy harms the entertainment or content industries, depriving them of the income they need in order to create more content. You will notice that, ultimately, there is actually only one argument against piracy: its effect on the income of the content producers.With as much as entertainment advocacy groups like to pantomime Chicken Little on this topic, you might be surprised to learn that the RIAA recently came out with its 2017 Year-End industry report, in which it gleefully notes both how much money the music industry is making and, importantly, how that revenue is growing rather than shrinking.

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You probably saw one of the many stories about the US government charging nine Iranians with "conducting massive cyber theft campaign on behalf of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps", as the Department of Justice put it in its press release on the move:

Since the FCC rushed to give telecom monopolies a sloppy kiss with its net neutrality repeal late last year, more than half the states in the country are now pursuing their own net neutrality rules. Some states (most recently Washington and Oregon) have already passed legislation that effectively takes the FCC rules and encodes them on the State level (in some cases with a few improvements). Other states have signed executive orders that prohibit states from doing business with or subsidizing ISPs that engage in anti-competitive behavior.With the FCC's repeal on shaky legal ground and states now passing even tougher net neutrality rules, ISP lobbyists have truly begun reaping what they've sown. And it's becoming increasingly clear they're both annoyed and nervous as the true scale of their poor judgement comes into view.For example, US Telecom, a top lobbying arm of the telecom sector (primarily funded and operated by AT&T), this week penned this blog post making it clear that major ISPs would fight tooth and nail against state efforts to (gasp) actually protect consumers from predatory telecom monopolies:

When it comes to censorship in the name of copyright, we've made the point time and again that opening this door an inch will cause supporters of censorship to try to barge through and open it all the way. Inevitably, when a population tries to satiate the entertainment industry by giving them just a little censorship, that industry will ask for more and more and more.A good example of this can be seen right now in Australia. Like far too many countries, Australia began a site-blocking practice three or so years ago. Currently, the Department of Commnications is asking for feedback on the effectiveness of this practice as well as feedback on each step in the process itself. The way it works in Australia is that rightsholders have to get an initial injunction which then winds its way to a site being blocked as a "pirate site." Well, for the largest entertainment industry groups in Australia, the feedback is essentially, "This is great, let's censor even more!"

Many of us tend to take the amazing resource of Wikipedia for granted: it's hard to imagine online life without it. But that doesn't mean its position is assured. As well as continuing funding uncertainty, it is also subject to legal attacks that call into question its innovative way of letting anyone create and edit articles. For example, in 2012 a former Italian Minister of Defense sued the Wikimedia Foundation in Italy for hosting a Wikipedia article he alleged contained defamatory information. He had sent a letter demanding that the article in question should be removed, without even specifying the exact page or where the problem lay, and filed the suit when the page was not taken down.In 2013, the Civil Court in Rome ruled that the Wikimedia Foundation, which hosts Wikipedia, cannot be held liable for the content of Wikipedia articles, which it does not control. Unsurprisingly, the former minister appealed, and the Court of Appeals in Rome has just handed down its judgment, which is in favor of the Wikimedia Foundation:

For years now, a guy by the name of Chris Sevier has been waging a fairly facts-optional war on porn. Sevier first came to fame for trying to marry his computer to protest same sex marriage back in 2016. He also tried to sue Apple after blaming the Cuppertino giant for his own past porn addiction, and has gotten into trouble for allegedly stalking country star John Rich and a 17-year-old girl. Sevier has since been a cornerstone of an effort to pass truly awful porn filter legislation in more than 15 states under the disengenuous guise of combatting human trafficking.Dubbed the "Human Trafficking Prevention Act," all of the incarnations of the law would force ISPs to filter pornography and other "patently offensive material." The legislation would then force state residents interested in viewing porn to pony up a one-time $20 "digital access fee" to whitelist the internet's naughty bits for each internet-connected device in the home. The proposal is patently absurd, technically impossible to implement, and yet somehow these bills continue to get further than they ever should across a huge swath of the boob-phobic country.Rhode Island was the latest state to consider such legislation, their version of the law (pdf) imposing fines up to $500 for each instance of offensive content ISPs failed to filter (costs that would, as always, just be passed on to the end consumer while tech-savvy porn users simply tap-dance around the restrictions). Sevier's garbage legislation saw some success in the state after Sevier randomly affixed kidnapping-victim Elizabeth Smart's name to the proposal to help sell it (her name is referenced on his website), something Smart herself has been none too happy with.Thanks to Smart's recent disgust at having her name hijacked, the original backer of the law in Rhode Island, State Senator Frank Ciccone, has decided to scrap the proposal after learning about its "dubious" origins:

Last week we noted that Best Buy was the latest to join a growing, evidence-optional blacklisting of Huawei based on ambiguous "national security" concerns. We also noted how despite a lot of hand-wringing on certain fronts for most of this decade, nobody has been able to provide evidence that Huawei actively spies on American consumers, the justification for similar blacklisting by AT&T and Verizon earlier this year (both bosom bodies with the NSA, it probably goes without saying). Few news outlets bother to mention an 18-month investigation found no evidence of wrongdoing by Huawei.While it's certainly possible Huawei is embedding backdoors no security researcher has been able to ferret out, it's just as possible that we're engaging in good, old-fashioned vanilla protectionism dressed up as ambiguous national security concerns. As one anonymous source told the Washington Post during the last flare up of Huawei phobia, getting non-tech savvy lawmakers riled up on this subject isn't particularly difficult:

We've discussed many times just how silly it is to expect internet platforms to actually do a good job of moderating their own platforms. Can they do better? Yes, absolutely. Should they put more resources towards it? For the most part, yes. But there seems to be this weird belief among many -- often people who don't like or trust the platforms -- that if only they "nerded harder" they could magically smarts their way to better content moderation algorithms. And, in many cases, they're demanding such filters be put in place and threatening criminal liability for failing to magically block the "right" content.This is all silly, because so much of this stuff involves understanding nuance and context. And algorithms still suck at context. For many years, we've pointed to the example of YouTube shutting down an account of a human rights group documenting war crimes in Syria, as part of demands to pulldown "terrorist propaganda." You see, "terrorist propaganda" and "documenting war crimes" can look awfully similar. Indeed, it may be exactly the same. So how can you teach a computer to recognize which one is which?There have been many similar examples over the years, and here's another good one. The Atlantic is reporting that, for a period of time, YouTube removed a video that The Atlantic had posted of white nationalist Richard Spencer addressing a crowd with "Hail, Trump." You remember the video. It made all the rounds. It doesn't need to be seen again. But... it's still troubling that YouTube removed it. YouTube removed it claiming that it was "borderline" hate speech.And, sure, you can understand why a first-pass look at the video might have someone think that. It's someone rallying a bunch of white nationalists and giving a pretty strong wink-and-a-nod towards the Nazis. But it was being done in the context of reporting. And YouTube (whether by algorithm, human, or some combination of both) failed to comprehend that context.Reporting on "bad stuff" is kind of indistinguishable from just promoting "bad stuff."And sometimes, reporting on bad stuff and bad people is... kind of important. But if we keep pushing towards a world where platforms are ordered to censor at the drop of a hat if anything offensive shows up, we're going to lose out on a lot of important reporting as well. And, on top of that, we lose out on a lot of people countering that speech, and responding to it, mocking it and diminishing its power as well.So, yes, I can understand the kneejerk reaction that "bad stuff" doesn't belong online. But we should be at least a bit cautious in demanding that it all disappear. Because it's going to remain close to impossible to easily determine the difference between bad stuff and reporting on that bad stuff. And we probably want to keep reporting on bad stuff.

Italy is rolling out new laws to deal with "fake news." The Italian government can't define this term precisely, but apparently assumes it will know it when it sees it. And the rest of the country is encouraged to "see something, say something," thanks to the government's online portal which will allow brigaders and hecklers to cleanse the web of things they don't like. Even if some of it stays up, those reported will possibly still have to spend some time interacting with government employees, which will mostly be a waste of everyone's time.And that's just the bureaucratic side of it. This portal will link to law enforcement so Italy's uniformed cyberwarriors can go harass citizens over alleged fakery the government can't even clearly define. There's nothing like settling discussions about factual misconceptions with shows of force from government reps.Seeing as the problem will get a whole lot worse before it devolves into just another tool of government oppression, UN Special Rapporteur David Kaye has fired off a formal letter to the Italian government, asking it to nuke its plan to tackle fake news with armed officers and government mandates.The letter [PDF] points out the Italian government is, in essence, criminalizing differences of opinion. That's not going to keep it in line with internationally-recognized human rights.

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Yesterday we went through the details of the truly awful appeals court decision by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) concerning whether or not Google copying a few pieces of the Java API for Android was fair use. As we mentioned, there were a whole bunch of oddities both in the procedural history of the case, but especially in the CAFC's decision here that has left a ton of legal experts scratching their heads. What becomes quite clear is that the CAFC panel decided long ago that Google infringed, and it's not going to let the law or even consistency get in its way. As you'll recall, the same three panel set of judges (Judges Kathleen O'Malley, Jay Plager, and Richard Taranto) made a terrible, nonsensical, technically ignorant ruling four years ago, saying that APIs are covered by copyright and then sent the case back to the lower court to hold a new trial on fair use.As we noted in yesterday's post, what's really incredible is that part of the reasoning in the CAFC opinion from four years ago is "this is an issue that a jury should hear to determine if it's fair use." And the ruling yesterday said "no reasonable jury could possibly find fair use" (after the jury here did find fair use). Which raises the question of why the fuck did the CAFC send the case back in the first place? To waste everyone's time? To pad the wages of the very very expensive lawyers employed by Oracle and Google? To waste Judge Alsup's time?Carolyn Homer, a lawyer who recently left a "biglaw" firm where she did copyright and free speech law for a public interest free speech law job, put together a fantastic chart comparing the 2014 CAFC ruling in this case and the 2018 ruling, highlighting where they appear to disagree with one another.

AT&T and the Department of Justice are ramping up their legal arguments in court as the DOJ tries to block the company's $86 billion acquisition of Time Warner. While some question the DOJ's real motives in the case (Trump ally Rupert Murdoch has been lobbying against the deal for competitive reasons for a year), consumer advocates agree that the deal will be horrible for consumers and competitors alike. AT&T already has a long, epic history of anti-consumer behavior, and critics charge the greater leverage will only let AT&T jack up licensing costs for competitors trying to compete with AT&T's own streaming services.To glean support for its unpopular merger, AT&T offered a special deal to 1,000 of its competitors. According to AT&T's proposal, if competitors agreed to support the merger, the company promised send any price disputes with other cable companies to an outside arbitration process. Most competitors were pretty clearly not impressed:

As you probably recall, last year the FBI tried to force a court to effectively create a backdoor for encrypted iPhones, using the high profile San Bernardino shootings as the wedge. It seemed quite obvious with how the whole thing played out that the FBI didn't really need to get into Syed Farook's work iPhone, but that it hoped leverage the high profile nature of the case and the "fear, uncertainty and doubt" around a "terrorist" attack to finally get a court to force Apple to do this. A new report reveals that the FBI was very much focused on using this case to force the issue to the point that top officials were angry that a vendor figured out another way into the iPhone, and stopped the court proceedings.Again: if the real goal (as stated publicly by the FBI at the time) was to find a way into this phone for important reasons, then you'd think the FBI would be excited when they found a way in, rather than pissed that a court wasn't needed to force a backdoor. But that's not what happened.A recently-released Inspector General's report [PDF] shows the FBI jumped the gun in the San Bernardino case. The FBI insisted it had no other options when it asked a judge to grant its All Writs Act request to compel Apple to break into the shooter's recovered iPhone. But this report shows these claims -- one repeated by the DOJ in its legal filings and by James Comey in testimony to Congress -- weren't actually true.

Macy's, the enormous retail company famous for its enormous department stores, has been featured in our pages before throwing its weight around over trademark concerns. If you had thought that the company has ceased its trademark-bullying ways, a recent report featuring a tiny hair salon in Scotland named after the founding couple's daughter will disabuse you of this notion.

By now, most folks have read about the fact that Uber (surprise) was responsible for the first ever pedestrian fatality caused by a self-driving car in the United States. Investigators in the case have found plenty of blame to go around, including a pedestrian who didn't cross at a crosswalk, an Uber driver who wasn't paying attention to the road (and therefore didn't take control in time), and Uber self-driving tech that pretty clearly wasn't ready for prime time compared to its competitors:

Facebook. Cambridge Analytica. Need I say more? There's plenty to discuss. Among them is the question of similarities between what happened and the Obama campaign — which is why we're lucky to be joined this week by Catherine Bracy, who led the Obama campaign's San Francisco tech office, and worked on its Facebook app, for a discussion about what really went down with Cambridge Analytica, and all the misinformation that's out there.Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via iTunes or Google Play, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.

It may be time to do some tests of Rhode Island water for heavy metals, as the state is experiencing a spasm of stupid when it comes to lawmaking. You will recall that there have been two recent proposals for new taxes in Rhode Island, one that would target video games rated "Mature" or higher, and one taxing the removal of porn-blocking software from any internet connected device sold in the state. If both sound almost hilariously unconstitutional to you, don't worry, they are. These laws likely won't pass and, if they do, the Supreme Court will certainly look upon them the same way a professional golfer looks at a two-inch putt. That the work of the anti-porn law is largely that of Chris Sevier, or Mark Sevier when the mood strikes him, who once tried to marry his own computer in protest of gay marriage and has been charged with stalking people twice, gives rise to one question: why are legislators in several states paying any of this any attention at all?Sadly, it's an open question. Mostly unreported in the past is that Sevier is pitching this law, formally the Human Trafficking and Child Exploitation Prevention Act, by slapping Elizabeth Smart's name all over it and promoting it as the Elizabeth Smart Law. Smart, should you not know, was kidnapped when she was a teenager and forced by her captor to do all sorts of inhuman things, including the forced watching of pornography. Smart now often speaks about the harm of some pornography in some situations for some people. What she has not done, apparently, is consented to have her name used to push this particular bill in Rhode Island.

Oh, CAFC. The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has spent decades fucking up patent law, and now they're doing their damndest to fuck up copyright law as well. In case you'd forgotten, the big case between Oracle and Google over whether or not Google infringed on Oracle's copyrights is still going on -- and it appears it will still be going on for quite a while longer, as CAFC this morning came down with a laughably stupid opinion, overturning the district court's jury verdict, which had said that Google's use of a few parts of Java's API was protected by fair use. That jury verdict was kind of silly in the first place, because the whole trial (the second one in the case) made little sense, as basically everyone outside of Oracle and the CAFC had previously understood (correctly) that APIs are simply not covered by copyright.Section 102(b) of the Copyright Act says quite clearly:

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A Pennsylvania dentist clinic has manage to destroy its reputation with a tactic it thought might actually drum up some business. Letters sent to parents by Smiles 4 Keeps suggested the dental clinic would get law enforcement involved if the company didn't see an uptick in new appointments.The letter, posted here by Twitter user @_NotYourMom, makes it clear the Smiles 4 Keep has interpreted Pennsylvania's child abuse reporting statutes to mean it can report parents to state authorities for not partaking of the clinic's services often enough.Here are the relevant parts of the heavy-handed threats Smiles 4 Keeps has been sending to parents.

By and large, the added competition being levied upon the traditionally apathetic pay TV industry has been a good thing. Though it has taken a decade longer than it probably would have in a healthier market, the rise of streaming competitors has forced incumbent cable companies like Comcast to up their game and at least consider lowering prices, improving abysmal customer service, and offering more flexible video options.Granted many pay TV execs seem intent on doubling down on the dumb ideas that cause cord cutting in the first place, but it's indisputable that we're finally seeing some evolution in the traditionally stubborn sector. Pay TV sector executives that believe cord cutting is a fad that magically ends once Millennials procreate are increasingly being marginalized, as are executives that believe they can milk the dying traditional TV cash cow indefinitely without repercussions.That's not to say that the new streaming frontier isn't going to be without some pretty notable problems. Studies suggest that by 2022, nearly every broadcaster, cable channel, and their mother intend to offer a direct to consumer streaming video product. That includes Disney, which later this year will be pulling most of its most popular content from services like Netflix and Hulu (Star Wars, Marvel films, Pixar titles) and exclusively hosting them on its own, new streaming video platform.On its surface this improved level of competition is most assuredly a good thing. But as we've noted previously there's a problem brewing here that most executives and analysts don't seem particularly keyed into. Namely, that once you've cordoned off each broadcaster and content-creator's product into countless walled silos -- each requiring their own subscription -- you've not only countered the biggest benefit of the streaming revolution (lower prices, greater flexibility), you've opened the door to customers getting frustrated and returning to piracy.It's pretty rare that I see research firms point out this potential pitfall. For example, The Diffusion Group's study noted that while they predict every broadcaster will offer their own streaming service by 2022, this could simply increase the number of annoying retrans and carriage feuds (and the annoying blackouts and price hikes that result) between cable companies and broadcasters:

The New York Times is reporting that the War on Encryption continues, with a renewed push for legislation the Justice Department couldn't talk Obama into.

As we've pretty well documented, the internet of things is a security and privacy shitshow. Millions of poorly-secured internet-connected devices are now being sold annually, introducing massive new attack vectors and vulnerabilities into home and business networks nationwide. Thanks to IOT companies and evangelists that prioritize gee-whizzery and profits over privacy and security, your refrigerator can now leak your gmail credentials, your kids' Barbie doll can now be used as a surveillance tool, and your "smart" tea kettle can now open your wireless network to attack.Security analysts like Bruce Schneier have been warning for a while that the check is about to come due for this mammoth dumpster fire, potentially resulting in human fatalities at scale -- especially if these flaws are allowed to impact integral infrastructure systems. But Schneier has also done a good job noting how nobody in the production or consumer cycle has any incentive to take responsibility for what's happening:

Just a quick update on the current craziness going on in the Swedish court system. In the middle of 2017, we wrote about the Swedish authorities raiding the offices of Undertexter, a site that provides fan-created subtitles of movies. Many people were confused by this, but the film industry has long branded fan-made subtitles as contributors to piracy, allowing people in foreign countries to download films and append the subtitles to watch them, rather than buying the localized version. The industry also argues that these subtitles are themselves copyright infringement, as they essentially reproduce the film's script in another language.Founder Eugen Archy was convicted of copyright infringement. Ever the fighter, he appealed, but now we learn that Archy has lost his appeal as well.

For no imaginable reason, Twitter continues to allow Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan to cleanse the internet of stuff he doesn't like. This doesn't begin and end with Twitter -- other social media platforms have obliged the president as well -- but Twitter is where it's most quickly noticed that something has gone missing.Kurdish-American activist and attorney Samira Ghaderi recently saw one of her tweets memory-holed in response to a Turkish court order. Now, it's one thing when social media companies start geoblocking/vanishing posts originating in the country where the legal complaint was filed. It's quite another when they allow Turkish law to take precedence over US law, which is what appears to have happened here.

Thought the whole Bob Murray / John Oliver story was over with the judge making it clear Murray had no case and preparing to dismiss the whole thing? It appears that Murray cannot let it go. As first spotted by YouTubing lawyer Leonard French, Murray (not his lawyers) sent the judge a letter whining about the whole thing (check out French's video for a wonderful dramatic reading of the letter):Or just go check out the letter yourself (kudos to French for getting the document and posting it and doing the dramatic read, shame on the West Virginia courts for not having web-accessible electronic records, and a plea to French to stop putting lame ugly watermarks on public documents). Of course, the reason the letter is public is that (1) parties are not supposed to talk to the judge about their case without telling the other side, and (2) parties are not supposed to communicate with the court directly, rather than via their attorneys. And, thus, the judge added Murray's letter to the docket in the case, along with a bit of a benchslap:

Cannes this week declared that the long-running festival would be banning streaming services like Netflix from being able to win the Palme d’Or. That said, festival leaders weren't able to offer a coherent reason why. Festival boss Thierry Fremaux apparently tried to offer something vaguely resembling an explanation to a variety of different news outlets, but wasn't particularly successful. Most of the arguments made by Fremaux to the press had something to do with Netflix being different (gasp) from the traditional film industry production and criticism model:

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Assuming you haven't been living under a rock, you know that on Sunday night, porn star Stephanie Daniels (real name: Stephanie Clifford) did a big interview with Anderson Cooper on 60 Minutes. Much of what was in there had been previously reported, though this is the first time many of the claims came directly from Daniels herself. But there was one "big" new claim, which hadn't previously been reported, and which is now getting lots of attention. It's that when she first considered telling her story in 2011, someone threatened her pretty directly:

Oh, good. Someone's trying to make journalism as dangerous as security research. A Canadian journalist who did something journalists do all the time is now facing the possibility of criminal charges for doing his job.

It's really quite incredible how, at nearly every turn, the New Zealand government has managed to mess up the legal case against Kim Dotcom. The raid on his house was later declared to be illegal, using invalid warrants. Evidence that was seized from his home and illegally turned over to the FBI was ordered to be returned. Oh, and then there was the whole bit about conducting illegal surveillance on Dotcom, deleting evidence of that illegal spying, and ordering officials to "bury" information about that illegal surveillance to avoid embarrassing the Kiwi government.And now we have the latest: A Human Rights Tribunal in New Zealand has declared that the New Zealand government violated Dotcom's rights in withholding information from him. Specifically, in July of 2015, Dotcom had made an information request (in New Zealand it's an "information privacy request" which appears to be a quasi-privacy/data protection-type right in New Zealand) to various officials in the government requesting whatever personal information they held on him. The recipients of the demands sent them to the Attorney General, who refused to comply with the demands, claiming they were "vexatious and included information that was trivial."The Tribunal disagrees. It goes through, in pretty great detail, the procedural issues at play here, including an attempt to discover this information by way of his extradition case, which was denied by the court. But that still left open the information privacy request. The court then goes through the question of whether or not it was even appropriate for everyone who received the request to hand them over to the Attorney General. This is done in almost excruciating detail, which we'll save you from having to go through yourself (unless you'd like to dig in below). However, the tribunal sums up the issue by basically pointing out that the recipients of the request were not supposed to transfer those requests to the Attorney General in the first place, as they had no legitimate reason to do so under the law (the fact that Dotcom was fighting the government in an extradition case is not enough).

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous commenter responding to the claim that the Blurred Lines ruling isn't a problem because lots of songs are not similar: